President Lynn Pasquerella, who became the 18th president of Mount Holyoke College in 2010, recently announced her resignation from her position and her exciting new job as the president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. As an alum turned fearless leader, President Pasquerella has continuously demonstrated the power, drive, and unstoppable nature of Mount Holyoke students. From spearheading incredibly successful fundraising campaigns and the groundbreaking policy to accept all students who identify as women, to the connections Mount Holyoke has made with people across the nation and the globe (including the United States Department of State). She has truly been an inspiration to us all with her vision. We were honoured to have the opportunity to sit down to speak with her about her experience as a student at Mount Holyoke, her time as President, and her new role at the AAC&U.
As a Mount Holyoke alumna what was the most important thing about your time here as a student?
Mount Holyoke was an institution that transformed my life and my career through liberal education. I think the most important aspect of my time here was that I found lifelong mentors in the professors, but also the fact that, when I was at Mount Holyoke, the tagline was “The Challenge to Excel” and I was challenged to excel as much by my peers as I was by my professors. The learning didn’t stop in the classroom; it continued even when I left the classroom and went to the library. I lived in Dickinson, so [we were learning] in the halls of Dickinson [as well] when we were just plopped down on the floor and talking about what was going on in our classes and exchanging books. So it was that seamless integration of the curricular and co-curricular, but also this vibrant community of scholars and artists who showed a passion every single day for our mission of using liberal learning for purposeful engagement in the world.
What made you choose to major in philosophy?
When I graduated from high school, my aspiration in my yearbook was to be a criminologist. I was very interested in issues of social justice and, in particular, conditions of confinements and prisoner’s rights. I found through studying philosophy that the law often has little to do with justice and fairness. In philosophy, looking at those important metaphysical and epistemological questions about the extent to which society fails to protect people from preventable harm mitigates when the victimized become the victimizers made me passionate about using philosophical concepts in a really practical way. This allowed me to apply what I was learning through the study of philosophy to real world problems around the reasons why people commit crimes, how we should respond as a society, and what that means in terms of our ethics and our values.
How did you decide to enter academia? How did you become a professor, and then enter administration?
Through my studying philosophy, I knew that I wanted to be a philosophy professor. I was fascinated by these problems, but always knew that I wanted to study metaphysics and ethics in a way that allowed me to apply them in medical ethics and philosophy of law. So there was no doubt in my mind that I was going to go on to teach philosophy, but I wanted to make sure that I was working in hospitals as a medical ethicist and in prisons as a prisoner’s rights advocate and so was able to do that through my work at the University of Rhode Island, bringing students into these venues in order to do applied philosophy and what we do here with community based learning. I was not particularly interested in administration. I didn’t have any aspirations of doing administrative work, but I always agreed to serve the institution in whatever way that I could. I spent 23 years at the University of Rhode Island after graduating from Brown University and was always eager to give back as well. When I was a professor at the University of Rhode Island, I taught at Brown Medical School. I volunteered my time as a way of giving back and then I just got asked. I was asked to serve as the Department Chair in Philosophy and I said, “Well, sure! I’m happy to do that,” and was asked if I would be willing to serve as the Associate Dean in the graduate school and said, “Yeah, why not?” and so just through the work that I did, people kept asking me, “Would you be willing to serve in this capacity?” I learned that, while I loved teaching and think that there’s no more important role than being in the classroom and engaging with students, being in administration provided a different level of advocacy for both students and faculty and I was happy to do that.
What does being a medical ethicist entail?
Medical ethics is applied ethics and normative ethics is the attempt to arrive at and defend certain norms, standards, or principles to guide behaviour. Medical ethicists deal with applied ethics and taking those moral principles and applying them in an attempt to resolve some specific problems. I deal with beginning of life and end of life issues, so circumstances under which people die, such as issues of physician assisted suicide, how we allocate scarce medical resources, whether the inevitability of death renders our lives meaningless and how we can find meaning and purpose in the face of death. And then beginning of life issues such as: are fetuses persons, are neonates persons? How should we engage in conversations around privacy issues, mandatory testing of pregnant women, fetal defects or drug use? How do we protect future generations? So medical ethicists try to serve as this sounding board for resolving the most complex questions of human existence.
What has been the most rewarding part of being the President of your Alma Mater? And what was the most fun part of being President?
The most rewarding part has really been the capacity to give back in such a significant way to an institution that transformed my life. The most fun part, of course, has been engaging with students. Last year, I was able to perform in the musical Rent, as Mrs. Cohen, Mark’s mother, working with Mark Gionfriddo and his students on the Big Broadcast, doing Canoe Sing, going to games and other competitions, going to watch the debate team, teaching classes. Any opportunity to interact with students has really been the most fun.
What do you hope people remember about your role as President?
I hope that people will remember that I’ve tried to live Mary Lyons’ mission of providing access to excellence for all students regardless of socioeconomic background. For example,when we froze tuition, room and board for two years in a row or when we have articulated our admission policy in a way that includes all women. I would hope that people remember that I have tried to tie liberal education to inclusive excellence in ways that will move us forward. The fact that, though the Lynk program, we have provided paid internships for each of our students as a way of redressing the growing economic segregation of higher education. I hope that people will remember all of these and look at the way in which these decisions reflect our deep and abiding commitment to liberal education.
Can you speak a little about the changes you have seen at Mount Holyoke during your time here as a student and then again as President?
Well, when I was here as a student there was very little diversity in terms of racial, ethnic and socioeconomic diversity. There’s much more now and I think this is one of our most significant strengths, that we’re offering a liberal education in an environment that is a microcosm of the world. We know that in a world that is globally interdependent, and with rapidly changing technology means rapid obsolescence, the best education we can offer for our students is a liberal education that trains them to be adaptable and flexible in the face of change. This also prepares them for jobs of the future that haven’t yet been invented. The extraordinary diversity that we have now was not present when I was a student. We’ve always been ahead of the curve in terms of welcoming diverse populations but one of the richest aspects of our community is diversity.That’s what has changed the most. The faculty are still as brilliant and engaged, the staff are still as dedicated and the students are just as talented, although I’m a bit daunted by the extraordinary talent of our students. It’s just so exciting to see what people are bringing and why they are attracted to Mount Holyoke!
What were your goals when you took this job 6 years ago? How have you achieved them?
My goals were really to enhance the visibility of Mount Holyoke as a place that was shaping the agenda for higher education. I’ve always know about the excellent liberal arts education that Mount Holyoke offered and sometimes Mount Holyoke alumnae, students, and faculty are too modest in terms of telling their own story. When I began “The Academic Minute,” a daily radio program on NPR, to introduce people outside of the academic community to the cutting edge research that’s taking place in colleges and universities and when I began “Difficult Dialogues from the Valley” at Amherst Media and engaged in a variety of outreach efforts as a public intellectual, it was always with this notion of enhancing our visibility and drawing attention to the remarkable work that takes place here every single day. I also wanted to enact political scientist Benjamin Barber’s notion of colleges and universities as civic missions and make sure that we increased our visibility in the local communities. There is this notion of places like Mount Holyoke as “elite” and “elitist”: the ivory tower as representing a willful disconnect from the practical matters of everyday life, but I’ve worked to show how the work that we’re doing here really can impact the lives of people in the surrounding communities, those we hope to draw to Mount Holyoke. For example, through teaching courses in philosophy for second graders at the Martin Luther King Jr School, with Tom Wartenberg and Lenore Reilly or the courses I did in sociology of prisons with Richard Moran or Critical Race Theory with Lucas Wilson, it was all about really making us a visible force in the lives of those outside of the academy. That’s some of what I wanted to do try to enact those values that were instilled in me as a student when I was here.
Is there anything you would like to achieve before the end of your tenure?
For me, the ongoing work is always providing financial support for students, to continue to provide access to education, so I would love to be able to continue to raise money over the next several months for this proposed community center. It’s a way of creating a hub for students to come together with faculty and staff and to make sure that we can meet our mission of fostering the next generation of leaders through access to excellence.
What have you learned from the experience and how will you implement it while serving as president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities?
I’ve learned that there is an urgent need for us to demonstrate the value of liberal education. I see the transformative power of liberal education in the lives of our students and alumni and recognize the attack that higher education is under, and liberal education in particular, as there is a push to vocationalism and pre-professional education. We all need to work together to make visible the ways in which a liberal education really furthers our goals of social and racial justice. We’re at a time where 1 in every 2 college students who begins with aspirations of earning a bachelor’s degree drops out and more than 50% of students who start college are in community colleges. We need to redress the growing economic segregation in higher education and we need to do that by really pushing liberal education as transformative power. I would like to take what we do very well at Mount Holyoke and replicate it in colleges and universities across the country and making sure that everybody is as committed to the issues of social justice as we are and can use that as a foundation for educational purpose and institutional practice.
What are your goals as the president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities?
There are two pillars in the platform of AAC&U: one is liberal education and the other is inclusive excellence and ensuring that the diverse population of students feels included. Not just admitted, but included. Inclusive excellence means that they really feel welcome and a part of a community that is achieving the goals of educating for democracy. So again issues of racial justice that we need to pay attention to, especially as we see protests in colleges and universities across the country to confront those difficult issues that face higher education. It’s not enough to just be given access, to be admitted, you have to be included. So what does that mean and how do we do that when institutions continue to be white spaces? This is a big challenge.
What message or lesson do you want to leave Mount Holyoke students with?
My message is pretty consistent and it’s what I tell my own sons, who are 25 years old, and it’s this: that you should follow your passions and your dreams, that the education that you have been given will prepare you to do anything in the world, and that you should be kind to people. There’s nothing more important than being able to make a difference in the world and our mission, I think, is the one that you can live by using liberal learning for purposeful engagement in the world. In the end, it really doesn’t matter what you’ve done if you haven’t given back to others in a way that will have made a mark in their lives. Oriss Raphael Cohen, a philosopher, talks about mystic unity with something larger than oneself and I think that is what’s most important: to find a mystical unity with something larger than oneself. That’s what we have at Mount Holyoke, this sense of sisterhood that transcends around the world and through time. I feel as connected to the alumni from the class of ‘42 as I do to the class of 2015. It is that common purpose. We’ve embarked on that common venture through life and it will always bind us.